New Zealand Conservation News

Small white butterfly ( Pieris rapae ) Today I have a little story based around a research paper which I just read. It turns out that female butterflies have an organ in their reproductive tract that is similar in some ways to a stomach/intestine.   This organ, called the bursa copulatrix, digests the male butterfly's spermatophore proteins but little was known about how it functioned before this study. The study was carried out on the small white/small cabbage white/white butterfly ( Pieris rapae ).   The small white is not a New Zealand native, but was introduced to New Zealand long ago and is now well established throughout the country, even reaching the subantarctic islands.   The small white caterpillar eats human agricultural crops (cabbage and other brassicas in particular), and so has been able to spread from its native range in Europe, Asia, and Africa across the globe following human agriculture and is now found in North and South America and Austra...

Male stitchbird/hihi (Notiomystis cincta) from Tiritiri Matangi. Not sure how fast his sperm is. Hello all, I can think of no post better to start off this new blog than a report on the Great Hihi Sperm Race, a fundraiser for hihi/stitchbird Notiomystis cincta  conservation.  Stitchbirds are a bird species that, while once common throughout New Zealand's North Island, nearly went extinct and is still in a bad way.  By the 1880's the species was confined to Little Barrier Island/Hauturu, and even today is still limited to only seven small populations.  Species recovery is plagued by a number of issues and they desperately need funding so they have come up with a novel idea: a stitchbird sperm race.  If you go to their website you can choose one of the males from one of four study sites and place a $10 (or more) bet on him, if you think he looks like he has particularly speedy sperm.  Dr. Helen Taylor from Otago University took videos of the sperm of 12...